Why the RIAA may be afraid of targeting Harvard students

The RIAA has targeted over 4,000 students at 160 colleges and universities …

Earlier this month, the RIAA announced that it had sent off yet another wave of prelitigation settlement letters to college campuses across the US. This time, the recording industry targeted 16 schools, including almost the entire membership of the Ivy League. There was one notable Ivy school missing from the roster, one that has failed to appear in any of the RIAA's press releases: Harvard.

The schools targeted run the gamut. There are large state schools like Ohio State University, the University of Texas - Austin, and the University of Tennessee. There are also a handful of small liberal arts colleges on the list, including Swarthmore College, evangelical Christian school Bethel University in Minnesota, Gettysburg College, and Carleton College. And the elite schools in the US are well represented, too: Stanford, Northwestern, MIT, and the aforementioned Ivy League schools have all received missives from the RIAA. But not Harvard.

We're not the only ones to notice that the nation's oldest university has managed to escape the RIAA's campus P2P driftnet so far. What gives?

We asked the RIAA about it and a spokesperson said that, while the group had yet to target Harvard, we shouldn't read anything into it. "It's a constantly evolving campaign, and just because a school has not received letters does not imply that it will not receive letters in the future," the spokesperson told us. The group also intimated that Harvard may have received a DMCA takedown notice, which the RIAA says it issues to notify schools of "illegal music file trafficking" on campus networks.

There may be another factor at work here: hostility towards the RIAA's campaign on the part of Harvard Law School professors Charles Nesson and John Palfrey, who run the law school's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Responding to the RIAA's claim that its litigation strategy has "invigorated a meaningful conversation on college campuses about music theft, its consequences and the numerous ways to enjoy legal music," the profs called on Harvard to not betray the "trust and privacy" of its students.

"The university has no legal obligation to deliver the RIAA's messages. It should do so only if it believes that's consonant with the university's mission," wrote Nesson and Palfrey. "[The RIAA seems] to be engaging in a classic tactic of the bully facing someone much weaker: threatening such dire consequences that the students settle without the issue going to court. The issue is that the university should not be carrying the industry's water in bringing lawsuits."

Should the RIAA decide to send prelitigation settlement letters to Harvard, chances are good that 1) the letters will not be passed on, and 2) some of the best and brightest at Harvard Law School will get involved in a big way. That doesn't look too appealing, especially when the campaign isn't going as smoothly as the RIAA would like.

Eric Bangeman
Eric has been using personal computers since 1980 and writing about them at Ars Technica since 2003, where he currently serves as Managing Editor. Twitter@ericbangeman